Reflections, Reviews and News from the worlds of Opera and Classical Music

Tuesday, 7 February 2017

Deutsche Oper Berlin: Lohengrin

Buoyed by the Deutsche Oper’s rejuvenating and invigorating Tannhäuser, and still buzzing from the
Semperoper’s terrific Siegfried, I
perhaps in retrospect went into this Lohengrin
with expectations set rather too high.

Some of the casting, on paper at least, had a couple of
surprises. But not, of course, in the title role: Klaus Florian Vogt performed with
the seraphic mien, boyish tone and apparently tireless stamina we’ve come to
expect from him. It seems increasingly that this is a marmite voice and
technique: some love it, others hate it. He remains unique, though, and
certainly impressive as Lohengrin, the role to which he is possibly best
suited.

Sung Ha, a late replacement, showed off a lovely smooth bass
voice, if not the requisite authority or gravitas, as Heinrich. Dong-Hwan Lee
was an impressive Heerrufer and John Lundgren a forthright if somewhat
relentless Telramund (he lost some of his vocal bite as the evening
progressed).

There can’t be many, meanwhile, who can sing Ortrud as well
as Elena Pankratova (last heard by me as a fearless Elektra in Dresden, as well
as an outstanding Fäberin in the
Royal Opera’s Die Frau ohne Schatten).
Pankratova’s voice is unusually beautiful for these roles, never really running
the risk of souring or fraying, it seems, and she sings with a bel canto-like musicality.

I wondered, in fact, whether she might have made a better
job of Elsa than Manuela Uhl, a utility Straussian (last year I saw her at the
DOB as both Salome and Danae) whose qualities include stamina and a large jugendlich-dramatisch
basic sound, but do not extend, alas, to much vocal beauty or stability in
terms of intonation—pre-requisites for Elsa.

(Click to enlarge)

She seemed more at sea dramatically than many of her
colleagues, too, in what were already rather choppy under-rehearsed waters. In addition, she made very little of her words and tended to drag things down, in pitch and
often tempo, at many of hear appearances. She’s a very useful singer, but this was
not wise casting.

Donald Runnicles and his forces—so compelling a week
previously in Tannhäuser—were having
an off night, too. The conductor’s tempos dragged in the first two acts (the
second act given in a very full version), but then tended to rush in the third.
The playing only intermittently found sheen and polish, the choral singing was
often rather raw and untidy.

In the circumstances it seems unfair to judge Kasper
Holten’s production. Of his Personenregie,
one suspected, there remained little trace in this hastily thrown together
revival (the 22nd performance since it was new just under five years ago),
making a poor case for his ideas. Nevertheless, even factoring in such theatrical
atrophy, it still felt worryingly confused, and an in-depth programme interview
did little to help unravel its knotted strands.

Holten had directed the work in Moscow four years before
this staging opened and seems to have brought certain ideas from that
production (a thinly-veiled allegory of Putin’s rise to power, by all accounts)
while adding several new ones. We have Lohengrin as dubious media savvy politician, then,
and choreographer of his own rise to power, but we are also in the aftermath of
war—not a war, but just war in general—with the male chorus as soldiers from a variety of eras.

One of the more interesting ideas involves Elsa as guessing
at what this Lohengrin is up to before anyone else, suspicious of his motives
from the start—although little of that remained in this performance. But the
attempt to create a sense of transhistorical universalism left us rather with a
sense of jumbled-up, unrelated specifics. And the stagecraft, particularly during a clunky Act 2 that sent us unexpectedly into false-proscenium meta-theatrics,
was also at times worryingly shoddy and ill thought through.

In the end, while I had come away from Tannhäuser newly convinced of its glories; this performance made me think that Lohengrin (admittedly
probably a far less interesting work) was worse than it is. And that’s never a
good thing.

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About Me

I am freelance critic, writer and musicologist based in Berlin. I have held editorial posts at Gramophone and Opera, was opera critic of the Spectator and have worked as a critic for the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. I was editor of 30-Second Opera (Ivy Press, 2015), now also available – when I checked last – in French, German and Spanish. My PhD (awarded from King's College London in early 2011) was a critical reassessment of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Die Frau ohne Schatten'; further details of my academic work can be found under 'Publications and Papers'.
If you'd like to email me, I can be reached on hugojeshirley[at]gmail.com.

About this Blog

Fatal Conclusions is designed to serve as a modest outlet for various reviews (of varying levels of formality and punctuality) and ideas regarding what's going on in the Opera and Classical Music worlds--and, if I'm feeling adventurous, beyond. Thanks for popping by. I hope you enjoy reading and please feel free to leave comments.